Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (722 page)

Hedda Gabler
is doubtless as suburban as any of its companions; which is indeed a fortunate circumstance, inasmuch as if it were less so we should be deprived of a singularly complete instance of a phenomenon difficult to express, but which may perhaps be described as the operation of talent without glamour. There is notoriously no glamour over the suburbs, and yet nothing could be more vivid than Dr. Ibsen’s account of the incalculable young woman into whom Miss Robins so artistically projects herself. To “like” the play, as we phrase it, is doubtless therefore to give one of the fullest examples of our constitutional inability to control our affections. Several of the spectators who have liked it most will probably admit even that, with themselves, this sentiment has preceded a complete comprehension. They would perhaps have liked it better if they had understood it better — as to this they are not sure; but they at any rate liked it well enough. Well enough for what? The question may of course always be in such a case. To be absorbed, assuredly, which is the highest tribute we can pay to any picture of life, and a higher one than most pictures attempted succeed in making us pay. Ibsen is various, and
Hedda Gabler
is probably an ironical pleasantry, the artistic exercise of a mind saturated with the vision of human infirmities, saturated above all with a sense of the infinitude, for all its mortal savour, of
character
, finding that an endless romance and a perpetual challenge. Can there have been at the source of such a production a mere refinement of conscious power, an enjoyment of difficulty and a preconceived victory over it? We are free to imagine that in this case Dr. Ibsen chose one of the last subjects that an expert might have been expected to choose, for the harmless pleasure of feeling and of showing that he was in possession of a method that could make up for its deficiencies.

The demonstration is complete and triumphant, but it does not conceal from us — on the contrary — that his drama is essentially that supposedly undramatic thing, the picture not of an action but of a condition. It is the portrait of a nature, the story of what Paul Bourget would call an
état d’âme
, and of a state of nerves as well as of soul, a state of temper, of health, of chagrin, of despair.
Hedda Gabler
is in short the study of an exasperated woman; and it may certainly be declared that the subject was not in advance, as a theme for scenic treatment, to be pronounced promising. There could in fact, however, be no more suggestive illustration of the folly of quarrelling with an artist over his subject Ibsen has had only to take hold of this one in earnest to make it, against every presumption, live with an intensity of life. One can doubtless imagine other ways, but it is enough to say of this one that, put to the test, it imposes its particular spectacle. Something might have been gained, entailing perhaps a loss in another direction, by tracing the preliminary stages, showing the steps in Mrs. Tesman’s history which led to the spasm, as it were, on which the curtain rises and of which the breathless duration — ending in death — is the period of the piece. But a play is above everything a work of selection, and Ibsen, with his curious and beautiful passion for the unity of time (carried in him to a point which almost always implies also that of place), condemns himself to admirable rigours. We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply find them in her character. Her motives are just her passions. What the four acts show us is these motives and that character — complicated, strange, irreconcileable, infernal — playing themselves out. We know too little why she married Tesman, we see too little why she ruins Lövborg; but we recognise that she is infinitely perverse, and heaven knows that, as the drama mostly goes, the crevices we are called upon to stop are singularly few. That Mrs. Tesman is a perfectly ill-regulated person is a matter of course, and there are doubtless spectators who would fain ask whether it would not have been better to represent in her stead a person totally different. The answer to this sagacious question seems to me to be simply that no one can possibly tell. There are many things in the world that are past finding out, and one of them is whether the subject of a work had not better have been another subject. We shall always do well to leave that matter to the author (
he
may have some secret for solving the riddle); so terrible would his revenge easily become if we were to accept a responsibility for his theme.

The distinguished thing is the firm hand that weaves the web, the deep and ingenious use made of the material. What material, indeed, the dissentient spirit may exclaim, and what “use,” worthy of the sacred name, is to be made of a wicked, diseased, disagreeable woman? That is just what Ibsen attempts to gauge, and from the moment such an attempt is resolute the case ceases to be so simple. The “use” of Hedda Gabler is that she acts on others and that even her most disagreeable qualities have the privilege, thoroughly undeserved doubtless, but equally irresistible, of becoming a part of the history of others. And then one isn’t so sure she is wicked, and by no means sure (especially when she is represented by an actress who makes the point ambiguous) that she is disagreeable. She is various and sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural; she suffers, she struggles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen interpretations, to the importunity of our suspense. Wrought with admirable closeness is the whole tissue of relations between the five people whom the author sets in motion and on whose behalf he asks of us so few concessions. That is for the most part the accomplished thing in Ibsen, the thing that converts his provincialism into artistic urbanity. He puts
us
to no expense worth speaking of — he takes all the expense himself. I mean that he thinks out our entertainment for us and shapes it of thinkable things, the passions, the idiosyncrasies, the cupidities and jealousies, the strivings and struggles, the joys and sufferings of men. The spectator’s situation is different enough when what is given him is the mere dead rattle of the surface of life, into which
he
has to inject the element of thought, the “human interest.” Ibsen kneads the soul of man like a paste, and often with a rude and indelicate hand to which the soul of man objects. Such a production as
The Pillars of Society
, with its large, dense complexity of moral cross-references and its admirable definiteness as a picture of motive and temperament (the whole canvas charged, as it were, with moral colour), such a production asks the average moral man to see too many things at once. It will never help Ibsen with the multitude that the multitude shall feel that the more they look the more intentions they shall see, for of such seeing of many intentions the multitude is but scantily desirous. It keeps indeed a positively alarmed and jealous watch in that direction; it smugly insists that intentions shall be rigidly limited.

This sufficiently answers the artless question of whether it may be hoped for the author of
The Pillars of Society
that he shall acquire popularity in this country. In what country under heaven might it have been hoped for him, or for the particular community, that he
should
acquire popularity? Is he in point of fact so established and cherished in the Norwegian theatre? Do his countrymen understand him and clamour for him and love him, or do they content themselves — a very different affair — with being proud of him when aliens abuse him? The rumour reaches us that
Hedda Gabler
has found no favour at Copenhagen, where we are compelled to infer that the play had not the happy interpretation it enjoys in London. It would doubtless have been in danger here if tact and sympathy had not interposed. We hear that it has had reverses in Germany, where of late years Ibsen has been the fashion; but indeed all these are matters of an order as to which we should have been grateful for more information from those who have lately had the care of introducing the formidable dramatist to the English and American public. He excites, for example, in each case, all sorts of curiosity and conjecture as to the quality and capacity of the theatre to which, originally, such a large order was addressed: we are full of unanswered questions about the audience and the school.

What, however, has most of all come out in our timid and desultory experiments is that the author of
The Pillars of Society
, and of
The Doll’s House
, of
Ghosts
, of
The Wild Duck
, of
Hedda Gabler
, is destined to be adored by the “profession.” Even in his comfortless borrowed habit he will remain intensely dear to the actor and the actress. He cuts them out work to which the artistic nature in them joyously responds — work difficult and interesting, full of stuff and opportunity. The opportunity that he gives them is almost always to do the deep and delicate thing — the sort of chance that in proportion as they are intelligent they are most on the look out for. He asks them to paint with a fine brush; for the subject that he gives them is ever our plastic humanity. This will surely preserve him (leaving out the question of serious competition) after our little flurry is over. It was what made the recent representation of
Hedda Gabler
so singularly interesting and refreshing. It is what gives importance to the inquiry as to how his call for “subtlety” in his interpreters has been met in his own country. It was impossible the other day not to be conscious of a certain envy (as of a case of artistic happiness) of the representatives of the mismated Tesmans and their companions — so completely, as the phrase is, were they “in” it and under the charm of what they had to do. In fact the series of Ibsen’s “social dramas” is a dazzling array of parts. Nora Helmer will be undertaken again and again — of a morning no doubt, as supposedly, though oddly, the more “earnest” hour — by young artists justly infatuated. The temptation is still greater to women than to men, as we feel in thinking, further, of the Rebecca of
Rosmersholm
, of Lona Hessel and Martha Bernick in the shapely
Pillars
, of the passionate mother and the insolent maid in the extraordinarily compact and vivid
Ghosts
— absurd and fascinating work; of Mrs. Linden, so quietly tragic, so tremulously real, in
The Doll’s House
, and of that irresistibly touching image, so untainted with cheap pathos, Hedvig Ekdal, the little girl with failing eyes, in
The Wild Duck
, who pores over her story-book in the paltry photographic studio of her intensely humbugging father. Such a figure as this very Hialmar Ekdal, however, the seedy, selfish — subtly selfish and self-deceptive — photographer, in whom nothing is active but the tongue, testifies for the strong masculine side of the list. If
The League of Youth
is more nearly a complete comedy than any other of Ibsen’s prose works, the comedian who should attempt to render Stensgard in that play would have a real portrait to reproduce. But the examples are numerous: Bernick and Rosmer, Oswald and Manders (Ibsen’s compunctious “pastors” are admirable), Gregers Werle, the transcendent meddler in
The Wild Duck
, Rörlund, the prudish rector in the
Pillars
, Stockmann and the Burgomaster in
The Enemy of the People
, all stand, humanly and pictorially, on their feet.

This it is that brings us back to the author’s great quality, the quality that makes him so interesting in spite of his limitations, so rich in spite of his lapses — his habit of dealing essentially with the individual caught in the fact. Sometimes, no doubt, he leans too far on that side, loses sight too much of the type-quality and gives his spectators free play to say that even caught in the fact his individuals are mad. We are not at all sure for instance of the type-quality in Hedda. Sometimes he makes so queer a mistake as to treat a pretty motive, like that of
The Lady from the Sea
, in a poor and prosaic way. He exposes himself with complacent, with irritating indifference to the objector as well as to the scoffer, he makes his “heredity” too short and his consequences too long, he deals with a homely and unæsthetic society, he harps on the string of conduct, and he actually talks of stockings and legs, in addition to other improprieties. He is not pleasant enough, nor light enough, nor casual enough; he is too far from Piccadilly and our glorious standards. Therefore his cause may be said to be lost; we shall never take him to our hearts. It was never to have been expected indeed that we should, for in literature religions usually grow their own gods, and
our
heaven — as everyone can see — is already crowded. But for those who care in general for the form that he has practised he will always remain one of the talents that have understood it best and extracted most from it, have effected most neatly the ticklish transfusion of life. If we possessed the unattainable, an eclectic, artistic, disinterested theatre, to which we might look for alternation and variety, it would simply be a point of honour in such a temple to sacrifice sometimes to Henrik Ibsen.

II. ON THE OCCASION OF “THE MASTER-BUILDER”

In spite of its having been announced in many quarters that Ibsen would never do we are still to have another chance, which may very well not be the last, of judging the question for ourselves. Not only has the battered Norseman had in the evening of his career the energy to fling yet again into the arena one of those bones of contention of which be has in an unequalled degree the secret of possessing himself, but practised London hands have been able to catch the mystic missile in its passage and are flourishing it, as they have flourished others, before our eyes. In addition to an opportunity of reading the play I have had the pleasure of seeing a rehearsal of the performance — so that I already feel something of responsibility of that inward strife which is an inevitable heritage of all inquiring contact with the master. It is perhaps a consequence of this irremediable fever that one should recklessly court the further responsibility attached to uttering an impression into which the premature may partly enter. But it is impossible in any encounter with Ibsen to resist the influence of at least the one kind of interest that he exerts at the very outset and to which at the present hour it may well be a point of honour promptly to confess one’s subjection. This immediate kind is the general interest we owe to the refreshing circumstance that he at any rate gives us the sense of life, and the practical effect of which is ever to work a more or less irritating spell. The other kind is the interest of the particular production, a varying quantity and an agreeable source of suspense — a happy occasion in short for that play of intelligence, that acuteness of response, whether in assent or in protest, which it is the privilege of the clinging theatre-goer to look forward to as a result of the ingenious dramatist’s appeal, but his sad predicament for the most part to miss yet another and another chance to achieve. With Ibsen (and that is the exceptional joy, the bribe to rapid submission), we can always count upon the chance. Our languid pulses quicken as we begin to note the particular direction taken by the attack on a curiosity inhabiting, by way of a change, the neglected region of the brain.